Métis: Race, recognition, and the struggle for Indigenous peoplehood by Chris Andersen (review)

From the iconic image of Métis leader Gabriel Dumont on its cover to its straightforward title, Métis presents itself as an unassuming study of contemporary Métis identity. Yet, from its opening pages, the author boldly opposes the common understanding of Métis as mixed-race to one that recognizes today’s descendants of the Red River settlement on the northern plains as an Indigenous nation. His is not the first book to make such a claim, but it does so with a passion and clarity that is rarely matched.

Métis is a must-read book for readers who have an interest in Canadian and US forms of colonialism, and to all scholars of contemporary Indigeneity, race and racism, and colonialism whose interests extend to the politics of Indigeneity. While Chris Andersen populates this study with rich details from existing ethno-historical debates, it is his unwavering challenge to the dominant notion that the Métis are a mixed-race group that is less Indigenous than the Nehiyaw or the Nakoda (two of their immediate neighbours and common kin) that will be its most lasting contribution.

In order to counter popular and (at times) scholarly opinion, he demonstrates how the Métis constitute a nation of people with corresponding political, social, economic, and historical based relationships and structures that are Indigenous through and through. Andersen outlines his argument in the first pages: “[Mine is] not a vision that seeks to deny our mixedness but rather a vision premised on the notion that all Indigenous peoples are mixed and that Métis hybridity is no different from the hybridity that characterizes other Indigenous peoples, especially those on the northern Plains of what is now western Canada, where the Métis rose to prominence in the nineteenth century” (5). The result is a study that challenges many of the accepted notions about Métis, indigenous, and white settler identities.

There is little doubt following Andersen’s argument that “mixedness,” whether in its normative bio-racial meanings or in a more symbolic register, continues to be imagined as an inherent characteristic of the Métis. What Andersen consistently reminds his reader is that at the origin of this understanding lay the assumption that the Métis become non-Indigenous (and specifically White) over time. In this sense, the biological imaginary fuelling the Métis-as-mixed-race ideology relies upon state-based administrative categories and policies and a wide variety of cultural texts that present the Red River Métis as on a one-way street to a life of Euro-Canadian normalcy.

It is the census that provides Andersen with the strongest empirical basis for his argument against the persistent racialization (through biology) of the Métis. Nearly a century-and-a-half worth of census categories—from “half-breed” to “Indian” to “other” back to “half-breed” and finally to “Métis”—demonstrate, in Andersen’s analysis, the normalization of a blood-based logic to Métis identity (80−82). This process has led to a situation today in which claiming “Métis-ness” in the public sphere often simply involves identifying with a long-ago ancestor, thus reifying biolineal descent (genealogy) over cultural (practices, such as ceremonies) and social (relationships, whether family or community) bonds. Who counts as “Indigenous” is certainly fraught with delicate personal and political dimensions, and Andersen’s willingness to tackle these issues is ultimately the most satisfying aspect of this book. He expertly illustrates how Red River Métis kinship relations stretch densely across and through contemporary Indigenous collectivities in ways for which the mixedness = assimilation = Whiteness configuration simply cannot account. He reminds us that an altogether different way to imagine the Red River Métis exists, as the work of several emerging Métis scholars attests.¹

Throughout these pages, Andersen provides an outstanding overview of the theoretical work of both Pierre Bourdieu and Benedict Anderson. However, his expert molding of their ideas aside, I...